The technology disclosed herein generally relates to systems and methods for detecting and locating an aircraft in distress. More particularly, the technology disclosed herein relates to integrated aircraft distress system architectures capable of providing emergency location functionality.
Most commercial airliners are equipped with fixed Emergency Locator Transmitters (ELTs) that broadcast beacons and satellite uplinks in the case of an emergency to enable search and rescue crews to find the aircraft. In some recent aircraft emergencies, however, the ELTs were not activated. Such incidents have shown the importance of providing a more reliable and tamperproof method to provide an accurate and timely aircraft location tracking, including the highly accurate tracking of an aircraft in a distress condition. Autonomous Distress Trackers (ADTs) are an emerging class of aircraft systems that support this need.
Based on the current methods of installing normal (non-distress, non-tamper-proof) tracking systems, ADTs for aircraft will typically be installed as stand-alone installations, e.g., there is the existing fixed ELT installation and a separate stand-alone ADT installation installed by itself or in addition to the existing ELT installation.
These separate installation approaches have a number of drawbacks; including new flight deck hardware to support the crew interfaces to the ADT, no improvements to the current ELT performance limitations, and two uncoupled emergency systems that require separate crew actions and potentially unsynchronized activation that may result in less effective emergency notifications and ambiguous signals to the emergency responders. Integrating these installations is a significant challenge due to the wide range of existing ELT manufacturers and interfaces and the range of flight deck and avionics interfaces potentially involved.
The foregoing shortcomings can be addressed by providing a system and a method that maximizes emergency or aircraft-in-distress location capabilities. To facilitate early and wide adoption, the aircraft-in-distress location tracking system should be designed to facilitate simplified and low-cost aircraft integration and installation.